Who is composer Julia Wolfe?

Unlike most people in her field – historical or contemporary – Wolfe showed no great desire to perform or write music during her childhood, nor during most of her teenage years. And yet she has gone on to become one of the most important figures in contemporary music, both as a composer and as an active enabler of others.

This September, we begin our Autumn/Winter 2026/27 series of classical music here at the Southbank Centre with one of Wolfe’s compositions, her dramatic 2019 oratorio for choir and orchestra, Fire in my mouth. Ahead of which it felt only right to take a closer look at the remarkable career of someone who very conceivably may never have discovered music as an outlet for their creativity at all.

She never set out to be a composer

Born in Philadelphia in 1958, Wolfe had no greater affinity to music than most during her school days. She learned the piano as a teenager, strummed a guitar occasionally, but until she attended university the idea of music as a pursuable career path had never crossed her mind. In 1976 Wolfe arrived at the University of Michigan intending to study social sciences and politics as part of their Residential College programme, but once there a friend encouraged her to drop in on a course called ‘Creative musicianship’, taught by the eclectic pianist and singer Jane Heirich. Wolfe may have had no formal musical training, but found herself drawn in by both Heirich’s enthusiasm and the idea of getting hands on with something rather than simply studying it.

In the early 1980s she took a life-changing trip to New York

While studying a postgraduate degree in composition at Michigan, a course which she has since reflected to be ‘a good exercise, but way too long’, Wolfe took a trip to New York in the early 1980s that would shape her life in more ways than one. Here she became friends with musical composition students Michael Gordon and David Lang. ‘It was a great moment in my life, a huge shift, hanging out with those guys,’ Wolfe told NPR’s Tom Huizenga in 2022, ‘I was very green, and I was finding my language — but I had the support… between Michael and David and all the conversations we had, it felt like everything’s possible, the worlds cracked open’. On Gordon’s encouragement Wolfe successfully applied for a place at his alma mater, the Yale School of Music, where she studied for a year under Martin Bresnick.

She’s 33% responsible for ‘the USA’s most important vehicle for contemporary music’

That’s how the San Francisco Chronicle has described Bang on a Can, the contemporary classical music organisation which Wolfe and Gordon (by now husband and wife) formed with Lang in 1987. Bang on a Can was the trio’s response to the fractured music scene they’d encountered in New York, a means to bring the artists of these disparate musical communities together. Initially formed to present a one-day marathon concert in a New York art gallery, Bang on a Can has since grown to become a multi-faceted performing arts organisation dedicated to the support of experimental music, that presents a range of year-round international activities. 

In that time their signature marathon concerts have evolved into an annual three-day festival, Long Play, and they’ve also established a summer festival for young composers and performers, informally known as Banglewood, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts. They’ve formed their own performing sextet – Bang on a Can All Stars – and 12-piece marching band – the Asphalt Orchestra – and commissioned and premiered pieces by a host of contemporary composers including Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Annea Lockwood and Iva Bittova.

Her influence expands beyond programming music to publishing it too

To this day Wolfe, Gordon, and Lang still serve as artistic directors of Bang on a Can, with their shaping of contemporary classical music in the US, and beyond, continually evolving. Moving beyond purely programming and commissioning artists in 1993 the trio founded the printed music publishing company Red Poppy Music to present their own compositions. And in 2001 they established record label Cantelloupe Music to, as their mission statement summarises, ‘provide a home for contemporary classical and post-classical music that is, in the words of Michael Gordon, ‘too funky for the academy’.’

She’s been influenced by a great swathe of different musical styles

‘I was a big Joni Mitchell fan,’ said Wolfe of her early musical influences in that NPR interview with Tom Huizenga. Going on to add, ‘I totally listened to Led Zeppelin. I find that music amazing. I listened to The Doors and Aretha Franklin, going into Motown and R&B’. At the University of Michigan Wolfe was drawn to the ‘amazing community’ of the Ann Arbor folk scene, particularly performers such as percussionist Percy Danforth and harmonica player Peter ‘Madcat’ Ruth.

Michigan was also where she first heard the music of experimental composers such as George Crumb, Gyögy Ligeti, Steve Reich and Charles Ives, many of them introduced to her by her mentor, the composer Laura Clayton. More recently, in a 2018 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Wolfe cited the influence of Meredith Monk, who ‘has such a unique sound and way of working with the voice, and the voice combined with instruments’, and also the ‘wonderful women in [her] own generation like Annie Gosfield, Eve Beglarian, Kaija Saariaho’.

Her compositions reflect her breadth of influence

Her non-classical route to contemporary classical music marked Wolfe as something of an outlier when her own compositions began making waves in the 1990s. Many of these works took influence from pop culture as much as classical tradition; pieces such as Lick, which is based on fragments of funk, and my lips from speaking for six pianos, which is inspired by the opening riff of Aretha Franklin’s ‘Think’. Wolfe has never been averse to composing for unusual instrumentation; beyond my lips from speaking’s six piano score, there’s also Lad, which she composed for nine bagpipes, and 2002’s Dark Full Ride for four drum sets.

She’s earned notable plaudits for creating music as a form of documentary

In 2009 Wolfe composed Steel Hammer, a work inspired by the ballad of the African-American folk hero John Henry. Written for three sopranos and chamber ensemble, it brought together aspects of the story’s many different regional interpretations, and earned Wolfe a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Five years later Wolfe won the Pulitzer outright for another work connected to American history, Anthracite Fields. An oratorio for choir and chamber ensemble that not only combines elements of classical and folk music but also contains several oral histories within its libretto, the composition commemorates the history of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Coal Region.

More recently, Wolfe wrote Fire in my mouth – which the Philharmonia Orchestra presents in its UK premiere here in our Royal Festival Hall this September. An oratorio for girls choir, women’s choir and orchestra, it was inspired by the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which claimed the lives of 146 mostly young immigrant women workers, and the political unrest that followed. It’s not the first time Wolfe has composed a work to respond to tragedy. In response to the 9/11 terror attacks on New York, the city in which she lived at the time, Wolfe composed My Beautiful Scream, saying of the piece, ‘the overall arch is a scream, in slow motion, beginning with the breath that one takes and reaching out to the extremity of the human cry’.

Her experimental approach to composition embodies an American sound

In the early 1990s Wolfe and Gordon spent a year living in Amsterdam, an experience she reflected on with NPR’s Huizenga. ‘You feel the weight of history more, I think, as a European. [whereas in America] it’s like anything goes, and the irreverence has its problems. But it also sets an environment where you can do whatever the heck you want. I don’t have to worry about what the tradition is, or if I’m breaking with tradition.’ It’s through her embracing of this idea, and the inherent ‘rawness’ of her music, as well as its ‘very natural tie to rock and roll and American folk music’, that Wolfe believes that her music truly does have an American sound.